{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 18/p01c08/p003-p008","extent":"range","passage_number":3,"through":8,"paragraph_count":6,"first_locus":"GA 18/p01c08/p003","last_locus":"GA 18/p01c08/p008","lang":"en","edition":"AP1973","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"title":"VIII. Reactionary World Conceptions","date":null,"location":null,"alignment_confidence":"medium","alignment_reason":"beads:embedding","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["AP1973"]},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null,"word_count":8603,"original_word_count":null,"may_be_abridged":false},"site_heading":null,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p003-p008","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p003-p008.json","lecture_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08#p003","word_count":2455,"quote_safe":true,"passages":[{"passage_number":3,"locus":"GA 18/p01c08/p003","text":"An exactly opposite intellectual conviction forms the point of departure of *Johann Friedrich Herbart* (1776–1841). Hegel is a sharp thinker, but at the same time a spirit with a great thirst for reality. He would like to have only things that have absorbed the rich, saturated content of the world into themselves. For this reason, Hegel's thoughts must also be in an eternal flux, in a continuous state of becoming, in a forward motion as full of contradictions as reality itself. Herbart is a completely abstract thinker. He does not attempt to penetrate into things but looks at them from the corner into which he has withdrawn as an isolated thinker. The purely logical thinker is disturbed by a contradiction. He demands clear concepts that can exist side by side. One concept must not interfere with another. The thinker sees himself in a strange situation because he is confronted with reality that is full of contradictions, no matter what he may undertake. The concepts that he can derive from this reality are unsatisfactory to him. They offend his logical sense. This feeling of dissatisfaction becomes the point of departure. Herbart feels that if the reality that is spread out before his senses and before his mind supplies him with contradictory concepts, then it cannot be the true reality for which his thinking is striving. He derives his task from this situation. The contradictory reality is not real being but only appearance. In this view he follows Kant to a certain degree, but while Kant declares true being unattainable to thinking cognition, Herbart believes one penetrates from appearance to being by transforming the contradictory concepts of appearance and changing them into concepts that are free from contradictions. As smoke indicates fire, so appearance points at a form of being as its ground. If, through our logical thinking, we elaborate out of a contradictory world picture given to us by our senses and our mind, one that is not contradictory, then we gain from this uncontradictory world picture what we are looking for. This world picture, to be sure, does not *appear* in this form that is free from contradictions, but it lies behind the apparent one as true reality. Herbart does not set out to comprehend the directly given reality, but creates another reality through which the former is to become explainable. He arrives in this fashion at an abstract thought system that looks rather meager as compared to the rich, full reality. The true reality cannot be a unity, for a unity would have to contain within itself the infinite variety of the real things and events. It must be a plurality of simple entities, eternally equal to themselves, incapable of change and development. Only a simple entity that unchangeably preserves its qualities is free from contradictions. An entity in development is something different in one moment from what it is in another, that is, its qualities are contradictory at various times. The true world is, therefore, a plurality of simple, never-changing entities, and what we perceive are not these simple entities but their relations to one another. These relations have nothing to do with the real being. If one simple entity enters into a relationship with another, the two entities are not changed thereby, but I do perceive the result of their relationship. The reality we perceive directly is a sum of relations between real entities. When one entity abandons its relation to another and replaces it by a relationship with a third entity, something happens without touching the being of the entities themselves. It is this event that we perceive, namely, our apparent contradictory reality. It is interesting to note how Herbart, on the basis of this conception, forms his thoughts concerning the life of the soul. The soul is, as are all other real entities, simple and unchangeable in itself. This entity is now engaged in relations with other beings. The expression of these relations is life in thought-pictures. Everything that happens within us—imagination, feeling, will—is an interplay between the soul and the rest of the world of real entities. Thus, for Herbart, the soul life becomes the appearance of relations into which the simple soul-entity enters with the world. Herbart has a mathematical mind, and his whole world conception is derived fundamentally from mathematical conceptions. A number does not change when it becomes the link of an arithmetical operation. Three remains three, whether it is added to four or subtracted from seven. As the numbers have their place within the mathematical operations, so do the individual entities within the relationships that develop between them. For this reason, psychology becomes an arithmetical operation for Herbart. He attempts to apply mathematics to psychology. How the thought-images condition each other, how they effect one another, what results they produce through their coexistence are things calculated by Herbart. The “ego” is not the spiritual entity that we lay hold of in our self-consciousness, but it is the result of the cooperation of all thought-pictures and thereby also nothing more than a sum, a last expression of relationships. Of the simple entity, which is the basis of our soul life, we know nothing, but its continual relation to other entities is apparent to us. In this play of relations *one* entity is entangled. This condition is expressed by the fact that all these relationships are tending toward a center, and this tendency expresses itself in the thought of the ego.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":909,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p003","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"l08","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p001","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p001"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":994,"en_words":1095,"ratio":1.1,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. 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See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":4,"locus":"GA 18/p01c08/p004","text":"Herbart is, in another sense than Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, a representative of the development of modern world conception. Those thinkers attempt a representation of the self-conscious soul in a world picture capable of containing this self-conscious soul as an element. In so doing they become the spokesmen for the spiritual impulse of their age. Herbart is confronted with this impulse and he must admit the feeling that this impulse is there. He attempts to understand it, but in the form of thinking that he imagines to be the correct one, he finds no possibility of penetrating into the life of the self-conscious being of the soul. He remains outside of it. One can see in Herbart's world conception what difficulties man's thinking encounters when it tries to comprehend what it has essentially become in the course of mankind's evolution. Compared to Hegel, Herbart appears like a thinker who strives in vain for an aim at which Hegel believes actually to have arrived. Herbart's thought constructions are an attempt to outline as an external spectator what Hegel means to present through the inner participation of thought. Thinkers like Herbart are also significant for the characterization of the modern form of world conception. They indicate the aim that is to be reached by the very display of their insufficient means for the attainment of this aim. The spiritual aim of the age motivates Herbart's struggle; his intellectual energy is inadequate to understand and to express this struggle sufficiently. The course of the philosophical evolution shows that, besides the thinkers who move on the crest of the time-impulses, there are also always some active ones who form world conceptions through their failure to understand these impulses. Such world conceptions may well be called reactionary.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":294,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p004","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"l08","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p002","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p002"},{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p003","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p003"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"verified","verified":true,"evidence":["anchors","reader"],"reader_german":["GA 18/l08/p002"],"length_check":{"de_words":410,"en_words":466,"ratio":1.14,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. 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The fact that they are teleologically ordered, therefore, points toward a wise world ruler who directs their relations. “No one is capable of giving a close definition of deity,” says Herbart. He condemns “the pretensions of the systems that speak of God as of an object to be comprehended in sharply drawn contours by means of which we would rise to a knowledge for which we are simply denied the data.”","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":172,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p005","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"l08","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p002","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p002"},{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p003","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p003"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"verified","verified":true,"evidence":["anchors","reader"],"reader_german":["GA 18/l08/p003"],"length_check":{"de_words":410,"en_words":466,"ratio":1.14,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. 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For what could a relationship of simple entities that are completely indifferent to all processes mean to the actions of man? So Herbart is forced to look for independent tools both for ethics and for esthetics. He believes he finds them in human feeling. When man perceives things or events, he can associate the feeling of pleasure or displeasure with them. We are pleased when we see man's will going in a direction that is in agreement with his convictions. When we make the opposite observation, the feeling of displeasure overcomes us. Because of this feeling we call the agreement of conviction and will good; the discord, we call morally reprehensible. A feeling of this kind can be attached only to a *relationship* between moral elements. The will as such is morally indifferent, as is also the conviction. Only when the two *meet* does ethical pleasure or displeasure emerge. Herbart calls a relation of moral elements a practical idea. He enumerates five such practical-ethical ideas: The idea of moral freedom, consisting of the agreement of will and moral conviction; the idea of perfection that has its basis in the fact that the strong pleases rather than the weak; the idea of right, which springs from displeasure with antagonism; the idea of benevolence, which expresses the pleasure that one feels as one furthers the will of another person; the idea of retribution, which demands that all good and evil that has originated in a person is to be compensated again in the same person.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":276,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p006","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"l08","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p004","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p004"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":444,"en_words":474,"ratio":1.07,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. 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Only a part of it, the part that considers those relations of beauty that are concerned with the realm of action, is to be the ethics or the science of the good. The significant writings of Robert Zimmermann in the field of esthetics (science of art) show that even attempts at philosophical formulations that do not reach the summit of cultural impulses of a time can produce important stimulation's for the development of the spirit.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":198,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p007","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"l08","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p004","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p004"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":444,"en_words":474,"ratio":1.07,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. 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As the laws of mechanics enable us to develop technical skills, so the laws of the psychological processes make it possible for us to devise a technique in education for the development of mental abilities. For this reason, Herbart's work has become fruitful in the field of pedagogy. He has found many followers among pedagogues, but not among them alone. This seems at first sight hard to understand with regard to a world conception offering a picture of meager, colorless generalities, but it can be explained from the fact that it is just the people who feel a certain need for a world conception who are easily attracted by such general concepts that are rigidly linked together like terms of an arithmetical operation. It is something fascinating to experience how one thought is linked to the next as if it were through a self-operative mechanical process, because this process awakens in the observer a feeling of security. The mathematical sciences are so highly appreciated because of this assurance. They unfold their structure, so to speak, through their own force. They only have to be supplied with the thought material and everything else can be left to their logical necessity, which works automatically. In the progress of Hegel's thinking, which is saturated with reality, the thinker continually has to take the initiative. There is more warmth, more direct life in this mode of thinking, but it also requires the constant support of the soul forces. This is because it is reality in this case that the thinker catches in his thoughts, an ever-flowing reality that at every point shows its individual character and fights against every logical rigidity. Hegel also had a great number of pupils and followers, but they were much less faithful than those of Herbart. As long as Hegel's powerful personality enlivened his thoughts, they exerted their charm, and as long as his words were heard under its spell, they carried great conviction. After Hegel's death many of his pupils went their own paths. This is only natural, for whoever is self-dependent will also shape his own attitude toward reality in his own fashion. We observe a different process with Herbart's pupils. They elaborate the master's doctrine, but they continue the fundamental stock of his thoughts without change. A thinker who finds his way into Hegel's mode of thinking penetrates into the course of the world's development that is manifested in innumerable evolutionary phases. The individual thinker, of course, can be stimulated to follow this course of evolution, but he is free to shape the various stages according to his own individual mode of conception. In Herbart's case, however, we deal with a firmly constructed thought system that commands confidence through the solidity of its structure. One may reject it, but if one accepts it, one will have to accept it in its original form. For the individual personal element, which challenges and forces us to face the self of another thinker with our own self, is lacking here.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":606,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c08/p008","german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"l08","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 18/l08/p005","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/18/l08/p005"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"length_check":{"de_words":479,"en_words":606,"ratio":1.27,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. 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